How China’s Debt-Ridden Local Governments Are Rewriting Their Economic Development Playbook
For decades, China's spectacular economic growth was powered by land finance, a fiscal model whereby local governments relied on selling land-use rights and land-backed borrowing as a major source of revenue. To fund development, localities created special-purpose entities, called local government financing vehicles (LGFVs), to borrow off-the-books from banks and bond markets for infrastructure financing and construction – a practice Beijing quietly backed to stimulate growth. By summer 2020, however, the COVID-19 pandemic’s skyrocketing containment costs, combined with the central government’s move to severely limit real estate firm borrowing, ultimately pushed local governments to the brink. With their land finance revenue stream all but gone, they were mired in hidden debt of at least $8 trillion by 2022.
Yet despite China’s economic slump and their massive fiscal shortfalls, localities remain responsible for development and continue to drive growth. What strategies are they using to compensate for the loss of land finance revenue?
Fieldwork conducted in Shandong and Jiangsu provinces in 2024 by Jean Oi, the William Haas Professor in Chinese Politics at the Department of Political Science and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, indicates that localities are pioneering new industries by developing integrated industrial parks and transforming their heavily indebted borrowing arms into venture capital instruments that invest in private startups.
Oi, the director of the China Program at Shorenstein APARC, outlines her observations in a study published in the August 2026 issue of the Journal of Asian Studies. The interviews she conducted in the two developed provinces come after a period of almost four years when few, if any, foreigners were allowed to conduct fieldwork in China, and “provide firsthand details of what is happening at the local levels, in cities and counties,” she writes.
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The Rise of Integrated Production Parks
In Shandong, Oi finds that authorities are directing resources toward new industries that address growing needs: not merely high tech but also elder care and health care, as well as advanced production to meet these ends. Some firms that were previously engaged in traditional manufacturing forms are the ones pursuing the new sectors.
And in both Shandong and Jiangsu, a major new development is the proliferation of integrated production parks built to accelerate the growth of these new industries. Unlike older forms of industrial parks that served as designated areas for individual factories, and unlike industrial clusters, these parks are complete ecosystems. Organized around a core product with guaranteed proximity to the raw materials needed in production, they ensure localized supply chains and dramatically cut transportation and storage costs.
“Integrated production parks are typically organized around one key input that links the activity of all firms within a park,” explains Oi. “The ideal scenario is to attract a major producer (a dragon head firm) that relies on this key input. That big-name firm, in turn, would draw in upstream and downstream suppliers, ultimately growing a whole production ecosystem.”
For example, an aluminum production park in Shandong took shape after a county-level firm secured a stable supply of bauxite, the raw material for aluminum, from a mine in Guinea. The local county government then built a self-contained ecosystem around high-value aluminum products on a site left by a bankrupt enterprise, attracting firms along the production process. The development of this park had a ripple effect, spurring the growth of integrated industrial parks in other parts of the province.
Crucially, such parks attest to “Beijing’s desire to reduce reliance on imports in China’s supply chains: a need that no doubt stems from security concerns after the disruptions during COVID and that have only been intensified post-COVID, with the rise in geopolitical tensions,” Oi emphasizes.
Increasingly, privately owned firms are the ones to populate the production parks, and many of them are recruited from outside of the locality. This dynamic, however, is shaped by the complex relationship between the state and private firms and poses risks for local officials, she notes.
From Land Finance to Venture Capital
The term “local state corporatism” (LSC) has been used to describe local governments acting as entrepreneurs to spearhead local state development. Oi’s fieldwork reveals that localities have adapted this model: instead of helping firms secure loans by acting as guarantors – which has been a defining feature of LSC during the market reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, or what Oi labels LSC 1.0 – local governments now directly buy equity in promising startups within their industrial parks, at times acting alone and sometimes cooperating with private venture capitalists (VCs).
“Local governments have become VCs who provide ‘patient capital’ (naixin ziben 耐心资本)” – officially described as ‘investment that generates healthy returns over the long run rather than taking quick profits,’” she says. She coins this new development model LSC 2.0.
Perhaps her most surprising finding is that those doing the investing for local governments are none other than LGFVs. “In Shandong and especially in Jiangsu, local governments are repurposing their LGFVs, transforming them from instruments of land finance into VCs,” Oi explains. “This finding is particularly noteworthy given the heavy debt and problems that many LGFVs faced in the wake of the COVID pandemic.”
To make this transition possible, local governments are executing a clever financial maneuver: injecting profitable state-owned enterprises (SOEs) directly into failing LGFVs, which, in turn, are acting as holding companies, each with SOEs as subsidiaries. This asset injection boosts the LGFVs’ balance sheets, raises their credit ratings, and allows them to issue new bonds and secure bank loans to fund local startups. Notably, this reorganization is done with the blessing of the central government.
Adapting Foreign Policy for Domestic Growth
To finance expensive industrial parks under tight borrowing limits, revenue-starved, entrepreneurial localities have found a creative loophole: the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). BRI is widely viewed as a grand foreign policy aimed at building infrastructure overseas. Yet Oi’s analysis shows that between 2013 and 2022, China accounted for the largest number of BRI projects, with 263 out of 2,254.
In 2015, Beijing assigned BRI-related roles to certain designated provinces and municipalities, with the rest being considered non-designated provinces or cities. Oi's analysis of publicly available data, however, reveals that domestic Chinese localities are strategically using the BRI label to secure funds and loan approvals to build new industrial parks, address continuing development needs, and bypass infrastructure spending bans.
Oi also finds that most BRI-designated provinces incorporated projects that fell outside the mandate envisioned by Beijing; that non-designated provinces, too, took advantage of opportunities within China under the BRI label; and that Shandong and Jiangsu are among some of the non-designated provinces that have been particularly active in pursuing BRI projects.
“The popularity of industrial parks might seem contrary to common perceptions of the BRI centered on infrastructure and international connectivity,” Oi writes. “While one might wonder how industrial parks would serve that goal, for some more ambitious localities, integrated production parks may represent a way to foster cross-border trade and business cooperation. This also reflects the growing importance of the international market in local state development plans.”
Challenges for Local State Corporatism 2.0
Can the new integrated production parks fully replace land finance? And what is the future of the evolving local state-led development model? Oi enumerates several steep obstacles ahead of this emerging local state corporatism 2.0.
First is a critical structural hurdle: under China’s fiscal system, local governments cannot keep the tax revenues generated by the industrial parks. Localities can only retain nontax revenues, such as factory leasing fees and rents, which are unlikely to bridge the massive fiscal gaps left by the collapse of land finance. Ultimately, it remains unclear to what extent and how quickly the new industries developed in integrated production parks can become substantial revenue generators for struggling localities.
Another hurdle for the new development model is manufacturing overcapacity stemming from deep investment in industrial expansion paired with weak domestic consumer demand, which triggers intense domestic competition and a race to the bottom in product prices.
Furthermore, in the era of geopolitical competition, trade and manufacturing have become security concerns, and geopolitical tensions are closing off export markets that the new industries desperately need. Finally, it is neither yet clear if cadre incentives will be effective in catalyzing the new development model, nor whether LGFVs will succeed as venture capital investors.
Related Research by Prof. Oi: Fiscal Politics and Central-Local Relations in China
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Having lost their primary source of revenue from land finance, indebted Chinese counties and cities are pursuing new strategies to sustain development, pivoting toward industrial parks and venture capital, Stanford political scientist Jean Oi observes in her recent fieldwork.
- Jean Oi’s 2024 fieldwork in Shandong and Jiangsu provinces indicates that cash-strapped local governments are shifting to a new development model after the breakdown of land finance.
- Localities are building integrated industrial parks around key inputs, linking suppliers, head firms, and startups into new ecosystems and localizing supply chains.
- Local governments are also transforming into venture capital investors and using the Belt and Road foreign policy initiative to finance development and growth.
